Kiasma
Issue 23,
Volume 7
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helskinki,
Finland, 2004
20 pp.
Publication address: http://www.kiasma.fi
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
Kiasma is published by the Museum
of Contemporary Art Kiasma, part of the
Finnish National Gallery. In 2004, it
featured a variety of cinematic and artistic
events, including an interactive installation
by George Legrady making use of the contents
of visitors' pockets. In this combination
of calendar and magazine, we get a glimpse
of the bidding war surrounding the Kiasma's
acquisition of Markus Cooper's Archangel
of the Seven Seas, a mechanical whale
sculpture that vibrates and emits whale
songs. We drop in on URBwww.urb.fiwhich
is the fifth urban art festival involving
youth in Eastern Helsinki as well as artists
from France, the U.K., and Canada. The
International Symposium of Electronic
Art (ISEA) held their 2004 conference
in Helsinkiwith a boat trip to Talinnas
they did in 1994.
There is much to be learned about the
art scene in Finland in this publication's
20 pages. There is a gallery of photographs
of local artists from the early twentieth
century to the present selected from an
exhibit at the Kiasma museum to celebrate
the 140-year history of the Artists' Association
of Finland. Writer Erkki Pirtola quotes
Joseph Beuys, "Every man is an artist!"
(as an earlier German Dadaist wrote "Every
man is his own football!") in the essay
Who-what-artist?. In this overview
of an art world where "everything is drowned
in a deluge of the self," Pirtola discusses
environmental artists Teuiri Haarla, Irma
Optimisti, and Luri Luhta and conceptualists
Harri Larjosto and Pekka Navalainen of
the O Group.
The most curious Finnish phenomenon may
be the genre of "steam art" sauna projects
by the Renvall brothers: DJ Tiska, Kimmo
Helisto, and Papu, the last of whom is
pictured naked emerging with a friend
into the chilly air to be doused with
cold water. About untrained and Do-It-Yourself
artists, "the self-made guardians of their
own lives," Pirtola writes with hurried
assurance that their "brave combination
of kitsch and social radicalness does
not, of course, diminish the value of
gallery art."